Book Reviews

“What Shall We Do with the Negro?”: Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America. By Paul D. Escott. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 304.$29.95.) “What shall we do with the Negro?” was the question that vexed whites of both sections during the Civil War, according to historian Paul Escott, whose new book revisits the Civil War–era debates over emancipation, reunion, and African American capacities (as discerned by whites). Because these issues were so central to the course of the conﬂict and the century that followed, they have been examined over and over in recent scholarship. Escott, then, surveys familiar ground. His contribution—and it is an important one—is to delve into Northern and Southern whites’ discourses concerning the future status of black Americans. Though Escott’s analysis treats the Union and Confederacy as discrete entities subject to distinct political forces, he reveals how contingent the policies of both the federal government and the Confederate states were on the events of the war and the actions of the opposing side. That is, in neither the North nor the South did whites have a free hand to answer the question of “What shall we do with the Negro?” Escott’s other valuable contribution is his forceful dissent from the prevailing and generally highly laudatory portrait of Lincoln and his commitment to racial justice. Again, other historians have covered some of this terrain before, and a few have reached similar conclusions to those of Escott. But “What Shall We Do with the Negro?” is unrivaled in its breadth, judiciousness, and, in a word, punch. Escott has not written an indictment of Lincoln so much as he has revealed the unwillingness of whites to consider, fully and fairly, solutions to the “Negro Problem” that might have diminished the likelihood that freed African Americans would experience another century of oppression. Thus, when whites answered the question of “What shall we do with the Negro?” they displayed a collective failure of courage, imagination, and principle.

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Escott dwells on Lincoln’s bullheaded enthusiasm for colonization, tortured vacillation on emancipation, and timid vision of the possible for postwar America. He also highlights Lincoln’s willful refusal to acknowledge the shallowness of Unionist sentiment in much of the South. Until the very end of the war, Lincoln was trimming his policies in anticipation that Southern Unionists would rally behind them. But if Lincoln exaggerated the depth of Unionism in the South, he also ignored compelling evidence of African American resolve and capacities. Unlike other historians who have argued that Lincoln’s commitment to black freedom and equality deepened over the course of his presidency, Escott catalogs Lincoln’s equivocations, backpedaling, and obfuscation on the issue of the future of slavery and the status of slaves. By way of contrast, Escott stresses that Jefferson Davis and the Confederate elite were comparatively consistent in their racial ideol- ogy. They were willing to contemplate bold and unprecedented steps to defend the institution of slavery, including impressing slaves to build fortiﬁcations and, most remarkably, freeing and arming slaves to defend the Confederacy (despite the support of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other military leaders, most Confederate politicos rejected proposals to mobilize black slaves into the Confederate military until the outcome of the war was a forgone conclusion). Escott convinc- ingly argues that even advocates of arming slaves presumed that this seemingly drastic step would preserve the Confederacy and, with it, both the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Confederates never deviated from their vision of a future in which most African Americans remained in bondage and all were, in every meaningful way, inferior to whites. We may be tempted to conclude that by 1865 white Southerners had succumbed to a racial fantasy in which they ignored the reality that the institution of slavery was doomed. But, in the most inter- esting chapter in the book, Escott demonstrates that it was by no means clear or inevitable that, as late as February 1865, the Civil War was a war of emancipation. The unsuccessful negotiations at the so-called Hampton Roads Conference between Lincoln, Seward, and agents of the Confederacy, Escott contends, show that the status of slavery remained open for negotiation more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. At the meeting, which was intended to open negotiations for a possible cessation of the war, Lincoln and the Confederate representatives shadowboxed over the issue of slavery and emancipation. As ever, Lincoln was obscure about what precisely

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he was demanding of the Confederacy. On one point he was unam- biguous; Confederates had to surrender. But otherwise he was cryptic about the future status of slaves and former slaves. Although it was clear that the slaves freed during the war could not be re-enslaved, the prospects for the millions of African Americans who remained in bondage was undetermined. Lincoln, Escott suggests, assumed that the courts would have to resolve which slaves were free and which were not. “But what of the Thirteenth Amendment?” asked the Confederate agents. Seward and Lincoln responded that the amendment, though already passed by the rump Congress, would almost certainly not be ratified if the Confederate states returned to the Union and voted against ratifica- tion. Lincoln even went so far as to recommend that the Confederate states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment “prospectively,” thus enabling it to take effect in five or more years. Finally, Lincoln reassured his Confederate interlocutors that he ardently supported compensating slaveholders for their losses when emancipation eventually took place. The Hampton Roads Conference, as recounted by Escott, repre- sented the convergence of Lincoln’s reunification-above-all principle and the Confederate reevaluation of the sanctity of slavery. Thus, at precisely the moment at which Confederates were engaged in strenuous debate over freeing and arming slaves, Lincoln made clear at the parley that emancipation was neither universal nor immedi- ately pending. Although events of the war rendered the conference superfluous, Escott explains that Lincoln’s paradoxical utterances at Hampton Roads emboldened Confederates who opposed emancipation and stoked their confidence that they would be able to determine the future status of blacks in the South. Even at the end of the Civil War, there was no doubt that Lincoln would not allow the policy of abolition to impede the restoration of the Union; while abolition had been a wartime necessity, equality for African Americans was never a war aim—much less a necessity. By the end of his provocative book, Escott prods the reader to reconsider the fundamental significance of the Civil War. Three- quarters of a century ago, leading historians argued that the war was an avoidable tragedy that had erupted because of incompetence, overweening ambition, and extremism. More recently, historians have presented the struggle as an inevitable clash of irreconcilable cultures that spurred the nation to cleanse itself, at last, of slavery. Escott’s book, however, fundamentally questions how cleansing the ordeal was. Pointedly demurring from any comforting interpretation of the

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war as a triumph of freedom and principle, Escott instead offers a sobering and unromantic account of the litany of squandered oppor- tunities, lapses in judgment, and equivocations by Lincoln and his fellow white Americans. We are left to wonder what might have been accomplished if higher principle rather than expediency had prevailed during the nation’s most traumatic and vicious conﬂict.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, is the author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005).

Devils and Rebels: The Making of Hawthorne’s Damned Politics. By Larry J. Reynolds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. xx, 313.$55.00.) When Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864 at the height of the Civil War, he was both the most critically respected and the most politically discredited author in America. Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking of the deceased man’s tales and romances, extolled “their atmospheric effects, . . . the blue of his distances, . . . the softening of every hard outline he touches, . . . the silvery mist in which he veils deformity and clothes what is common so that it changes to awe-inspiring mystery, by the clouds of gold and purple which are the drapery of his dreams.” But as the abolitionist Moncure Daniel Conway recalled about the war years, Hawthorne “had no party,—then the equivalent to having no country.” Little has changed since then, argues Larry J. Reynolds in Devils and Rebels, his important and sensitive new examination of Hawthorne’s politics during a period of political dissension and civil war. Hawthorne may retain a chief position in the canon of antebellum American writers, but his politics—initially condemned by abolitionist Concord as well as by his wife Sophia’s family, the Peabodys—have faced unrelenting opprobrium from subsequent generations of biographers, historians, and literary scholars. It is Reynolds’s task to restore “the depth, complexity, and even pro- gressiveness of Hawthorne’s political views” without defending ei- ther his stubborn conservatism or “repugnant racism” (p. xiv). He does so by recounting in meticulous detail the process by which Hawthorne arrived at a “system of values and beliefs as they affected his political perspectives, especially on abolitionism and slavery” (p. xiii).

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